Where's a Warrior Without Her Pride?

When I was a teenager, I wrote a lot. I started a lot of stories and finished very few of them. Some of them were awful. Just bad.

Some of them, however, I think had promise. I had big ideas for a series of novels that would all interlink at various points in time, space, and character and be part prose, part graphic novel. 

For some reason, I was reminded of this one the other day - one that was meant to start such a series that would have one story now, and then pick up the themes and maybe some characters or places much later.This is the start of a story that I started when I was 17 and I added to it periodically until I was about 19 and discovered going out and girls, and then university. I got as far in as writing about 50 A4 pages before I added no more, so as it stands, the story is incomplete but I thought I'd share the intro, the first 2 pages of it, here. 

This is about 12 years old, so please be gentle with it. I haven't altered so much as a punctuation mark from when this was last saved to my old laptop in 2002.What do you reckon? Should I pick this up again?

This is the beginning of, "Where's a Warrior Without Her Pride".

    There she stood, stripped to the waist, waiting. Silence pressed down, heavy as a wet pelt rug spread over the scene. The quick, tight pat of the drums had long faded and the chants had reached their high fevered climax moments ago giving way to the soft voice of the wind.
Crushing terror beat about her like an enormous winged thing, threatening to capture her, but she instead caught it and leashed it and brought it under her control until its only freedom was in the sweat that broke out over the girl’s tanned exposed skin.
The chattering of the crowd at her back dulled to a murmur as the shaman and Gaideon, the leader of the warriormages, stepped to behind her. Area tightened her grip on the stakes. A drop of blood appeared below her palm and hung for a moment before dropping into the dust. Swallowing despite her dry mouth and ever-present threat of vomit, she closed her eyes tightly, shutting out her town which rose before her. She concentrated on sensing nothing; not the sun searing her bare back, not the low murmurs of the watchers she could not see, not the agony that was now almost upon her. For long moments, silence reigned.
Making formal declarations in the Old Tongue that Area would have understood if she’d been concentrating on them, the two highly respected men took their positions, beside each other, directly behind the girl. Area heard the curt scuff of their footsteps coming to a stop on the dirt. The time had come. Her breathing became quick and shallow and the sweat ran down her body in glistening rivulets. She adjusted her weight on her feet a little and braced herself.
Still murmuring in the Old Tongue, both men linked hands then extended their free arms towards Area. There was a static hum, then suddenly, flashes of blue-white, buzzing energy issued forth from their hands like Lightning, as he impels his awesome chariot through the clouds. The blasts lashed into the girl’s shoulder blades, charring her skin. She stiffened her back as an instant response, arching in throes as the twin blasts streamed into her, burning her back, but she did not release her grip. The energy was not just burning her. Aside from the consuming agony, she could feel the crude energy coursing into her and through her, probing her. Testing her. She could feel it racing through her veins into every part of her and it made her shiver and sweat and it made her feel ill. The smell of her flesh burning drifted to her nostrils. Fixed at their source and fixed at their target, the intense bolts whipped and snapped, playfully interacting with each other, twining lustfully round each other in one instant and repelling each other with the violence of a lightning strike in the next. The assembled audience of townspeople could hear the buzz and crack but they could barely see anything; so blindingly bright was the light from the fitful energy streams.
As she grunted in pain, all thoughts paled into obscurity, then were seared from the girl’s mind; all except the purifying agent of those blasts of pain. Blue-white pain-flash was all she could see, all she could hear, all she could taste; sour and bitter on her tongue. Still she held her arms out and gripped the stakes. Now, she could not even think about her arms. She had overcome the initial urge to snap them down protectively but then any thought of moving them had been blown away and she could only tighten her grip ever more. Radiant pain grew ever more in her mind until its intense brilliance threatened to blind her consciousness and shatter her mind. She could feel every part of her part of her body resonating a scream of torment that grew louder like the wail of so many trapped spirits suffering in turmoil and it joined with the throbbing pulse in her ears, and it climaxed and it felt to the girl as if she were about to rip and release the horrible pain from her body and the blasts stopped.
Every person in the crowd remained squinting, transfixed. It was now to them as if they had come into a dark room after staring at the sun. Every single person could, however, feel the charge now in the air.
Silence.
Her jaw was clenched tight, the muscles bulging beneath her cheeks. Some moments later, Area’s raw and aching hands released the stakes. She barely winced as muscles rubbed beneath dual symbols newly burnt into her back.
Area stands motionless between the stakes for a long while, hanging like a ball thrown up at the peak of its ascent, in the instant just before it falls. She opens her eyes wide, takes a deep gasp of air, and slumps, but immediately catches herself on her knee and with weary determination, she stands.
The shaman and Gaideon come to her side. They do not help to support her. The shaman drapes a dark robe about her shoulders. Slowly, Area turns to face the audience. She is smiling.

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Possibly my favourite ever joke. Sorry!

A man is walking down the road when he sees a man on the other side, dressed in a nice suit, who has a tangerine for a head. Now the man is curious so he crosses over and stops the man. 

"Excuse me," he says. "I don't mean to be rude but I couldn't help but notice you have a tangerine for a head."

"Yes I do," the citrus-bonced man replies. 

"I was just wondering how you got it?"

"Well, I was clearing out my attic," the fruit-faced man begins, "when I found an old lamp. I wasn't expecting anything y'know, but I had to give it a rub and lo and behold, a genie came out and offered me three wishes!"

"Wow!" the man exclaims! "So what did you wish for?"

"For my first wish, I wished for £100,000,000 and suddenly, my attic was filled with money! Crammed into every nook and cranny. I've been living very well since! I'm still finding bank notes all over my house!"

The man is taken aback! "This is incredible!"

"For my second wish, I wished for my every sexual wish to be fulfilled! Immediately there was a knock at the door. It was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen and she said she'd seen me around and was chancing it and wondered if I wanted some no-holds barred sex. That was a great day, I tell you! she has absolutely no inhibitions! But even better than that, we fell in love and recently got married and are still having the most mind-blowing sex!"

The man is staggered. "That's awesome!" But the question looms large. "So... erm... what did you ask for for your third wish?"

"Well," the lucky genie-finder replies, "for my third wish, I wished that I had a tangerine for a head."

-Curt-

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Existential Crisis in Ikea

I had a revelation walking round Ikea the past weekend. And it wasn't that the storage solution in my own home is inefficient.

I've often thought I'm not the best consumer. I'd even go as far as to say I've prided myself on this. 

I also am quite good in that, if I go to the shops for a £10 item I need, I don't also come away with £20 worth of stuff I don't need. I try to be rational about my purchases and I try not to be too material in my desires. Of course I like having stuff, but I try not to let my stuff define me.

I also try to buy stuff based on merit rather than association and I'd be curious to know how much of my decision making is more influenced by subtle advertising cues than I realise. I am aware that I speak as a consumer in a first world consumer culture. 

For example, I have an iPhone 5. I believe I bought an iPhone initially because my old phone was falling apart so I wanted a new phone (which is not a necessity, I know, but definitely not an extravagant want for the society I live in). I knew a lot of people with iPhones and knew from talking to them that it would fulfil the requirements I had of it well. I believe I didn't get an iPhone because they were the new shiny must-have toy. I got the iPhone 5 because my iPhone 3 literally fell apart after years of service - not because I wanted the (then) newest shiniest phone.

Now a visit to Ikea really weirded me out the other day in a way that I think I'm often weirded out by big shops, but not usually on this scale.

The shop is immense, as I'm sure you're already aware, and laid out in part as little perfect rooms furnished beautifully entirely in Ikea products. It's clearly aspirational marketing done well. The aim is simply that you see these rooms, you aspire to have a room just like it and set to acquiring all the individual components in that collection to achieve this. Along the way, you pick up things that previously you have never needed/wanted/realised such a thing even existed but having seen them in this setting you need them to complete your room so it looks as cute and cosy as the in-store one.

I think I'm normally quite resilient to this sort of thing and quite pragmatic about buying only things I want or need (inasmuch as I "need" anything) and ignoring extraneous fluff.

However, as I went round Ikea I got to thinking about why I'm so bullish about this. I began wondering if it's less to do with a strong mind and having decided on my own individuality, and more to do with not being able to imagine ever not being broke.

It occurred to me that aspirational marketing only works if you can conceive of achieving the lifestyle being sold. I consider any month where I haven't accrued bank charges for going over my overdraft limit a success so the thought of being able to afford a lovely new storage solution for a couple of hundred pounds is ludicrous. Let alone all the rest of the stuff that goes with it. So instead I pooh-pooh it. It's a defence. And once I opened the gate in the defence and peered through it, I became horribly downcast in the middle of Ikea and couldn't have sat on the floor and cried..
Don't get me wrong - I don't have desire to be rich, just comfortable enough that booking a hotel room for a friend's wedding doesn't leave me terrified about how I'm going to get through the rest of the month.

It's the same reason why, although travel and far-away places excite me, I never read travel magazines or reviews. They just make me deeply unhappy that I can't conceive of going to these places.

It was this printed canvas that did it:

because it was the first time I couldn't pooh pooh it quite so easily because I genuinely like the picture. Klimt is one of my favourite artists. I genuinely wanted this. I tried to tell myself I didn't just like all the other stuff and I didn't really want it. Besides, I can't afford it anyway. Then thought that I don't have a house to hang it in anyway. Nor do I see how I ever will do. So then what was the point of wanting any of this stuff because where would I put it? I became sad, not because I couldn't afford the things in Ikea, but because I didn't have the option of affording the things in Ikea.
Thus began something of a cascade of disappointment: I became upset I couldn't afford these things in Ikea, upset I couldn't afford a house, upset that I am 31 and not better off, upset that I worked every day at a so-so job that helps accrue more finances for a global corporation that gives me just enough money to ensure I can afford to come in and do the same tomorrow, upset that I'm bright and have so much potential (teacher's words - not mine) and I feel I'm squandering it in the years when I should be building up something awesome, upset that I haven't really left much of a mark on the world.

This is why I can't have nice things. Going to look at them triggers an existential crisis for me.

First World problems, eh?

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Things I learnt today while researching the Cadbury Caramel Bunny and other mascots

At work today, I've been looking at popular mascots to put together some slides for our marketing presentation after the Cadbury's Caramel Bunny was ranked 4th in a poll of mascots.

Here are some of the things I found out:

1.) Wikifur exists...

Yes. It's a wiki encyclopedia for "furries".

Here's the Caramel Bunny's entry (chortle!): http://en.wikifur.com/wiki/Cadbury_Caramel_Bunny

2.) This thread starter was happy to admit to the world that he masturbated over the cartoon rabbit, but finding out (mistakenly) that she was voiced by Grotbags was a step too far.

He's a "wicked child" because...

3.) The lady who actually voiced the Cadbury Caramel Bunny is Miriam Margoyles who also played Lady Whiteadder in Blackadder, Professor Sprout in the Harry Potter films, voiced most of the women in the English dub of Monkey, and Aunt Sponge in James and the Giant Peach!

4.) Alexandr Orlov, the Compare the Market Meercat, is voiced by Simon Greenall who plays Michael in Alan Partridge.

5.) The PG Tips Monkey, originally created for ITV Digital, became the subject of a legal battle between ITV and Mother, the ad agency that created him. It was settled when both parties agreed to donate the rights to Comic Relief.
PG Tips now use Monkey, but any profits from Monkey merchandise go to Comic Relief who still own the rights.

6.) Grotbags!

No facts.

Just remember how awesome she was!

 




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A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 3.

Written on 2/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

This post continues documenting my designing of my Coggingtons Christmas Card (click the link to buy from my Etsy store), and follows on  from A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 2.

This is how I left this pic before the weekend. Since then, I have finished it!

After writing the last blog post, I decided that his cuff fur trim was way too narrow so I widened that up and decided I wanted to texture it a bit more. I was at the house of Jicsi's Jewellery and her littl'un has some teddy bears, so I spent 5 minutes photographing bear bums to use as a fur texture. When I got home, I whipped out an old belt for his belt texture too.

The whole pic was well on the way then. A bit of light and shade in the eyes and bits of shading in other things here and there, and adding Geoffrey's other fingers to the tree left me ready to add the frame and lettering.

My stamping is not really up to scratch so I stamped out the message, but knew I'd need to tidy it up in Photoshop. Then it occurred to me that while I'm at it, I might as well do the whole alphabet so that next time I need some lettering, I can just nick it from the master sheet.

I learnt I can't keep my stamping in a straight line.

I borrowed a frame from Jicsi to photograph, and then put it in the illustration and resized and reshaped it. It is a round frame, which I liked because it was reminiscent of a snowflake, but I was aware that to fit the writing into it the frame would need to be widened so that was an unfortunate sacrifice. To simply make it bigger whilst contraining the proportions would have led to the frame dominating the image which I didn't want.

Then I dropped a photograph of some textured paper I took ages ago over the top with an off-white layer set to 'colour' over the top to take the glare off it. Then I masked it to the right shape and size and used the burn tool around the edges for a bit of shade, then dropped my newly neatened up stamping over the top. I had to make the lettering quite narrow to fit it in which isn't ideal.  I had to play around with masks and his top hat for a bit to get them right but it worked.

That left me here. I'd spent a bit deciding whether I wanted his coat a nice bright red, or a little darker. I'd gone with darker at this point but I still wasn't convinced.

I had some pictures of some cog-esque paper snowflakes I'd made years ago so I did experiment with having them as fairly prominent hazy overlays but decided they were better behind the frame, and as small ornaments in the tree

All of my previous Coggington cards have always been done using just flat colours (apart from the glowing eyes) and textures and for this reason, I'd been reluctant to to add more subtle light and shade from the tree lights. This had been a conscious decision and I liked the way my Valentine's Coggington card could look a bit like it had been done with woodblock prints. Although I'd lost a bit of that with my more recent cards, I'd still always just used flat colours for them.
 However, I just couldn't be happy with the shade of his coat so I decided to very simply lighten Geoffrey on the side nearest the tree (50% opacity white layer set to 'overlay'), and darken him on the other side (35% opacity near-black layer set to 'vivid light'). It looked a lot better than I'd thought it would so then I applied an orange-to-transparent gradient to Geoffrey from right to left. I liked these effects so much, I made the light and dark layers more opaque (the dark one is set to 100% 'vivid light') and applied another similar gradient to him.

He looks warm, don'tcha think?

Right at the end, I remembered I wanted goggles on his top hat. I was excited that I could justify these goggles rather than just having them there because steampunk. (Yeah - I know he's a robot who doesn't need eye-protection when flying a steam-powered sleigh! Shh!)
Off I went to the living room to photograph my goggles whilst trying to stop the kitten from savaging them. I transformed the strap to the right place and applied a 'cutout' effect to them, then put a yellow low-opacity colour layer over the top to help blend them and shaded them and tweaked the levels a little.

I'm very happy with the results you see here.

The card is available to buy from this link: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/204426247/steampunk-christmas-card-with-the 

The finished card!

Cheers for reading this far!

-Curt-

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A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 2.

Written on 17/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

This post continues documenting my designing of my Coggingtons Christmas Card (click the link to buy form my Etsy shop), and follows on from A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 1.

I now have a little more work done on this.

My main point of focus today was getting the Christmas tree to look like a tree. I want the lights on it to pop but also for the rest of the tree, which is mainly black in my photo, to not just blend into the background and become a black smoosh of nothingness.

Erasing the bit of curtains etc that was in the background of this picture of the tree was first.

Then I applied a couple of hue/saturation modification layers to the tree and adjusted the levels to highlight the lights, bump up the saturation, and alter the hue slightly.

Then I created a mask of the tree, and put a layer of gold over the top, set to colour blending mode to make it warm and suggest the yellows of the background.

Then I created a custom brush from a photo of a fir tree branch, colour selected the dark areas, and used the brush at low opacity and with varying shades of green to bring some of the shadows to a nice Christmas tree-esque green.

I lens blurred the background a bit and took the brightness down.

I've started shading Geoffrey's coat and applied the same rusted metal texture I usually use on Coggingtons to him.

Lastly, I've applied the old photograph border I created for my Coggingtons card to this, and darkened selected bits of the background.

I've decided I need to photograph a pair of my goggles for his hat (legitimate reason though: He's been flying a sleigh! I'm not just sticking goggles in because steampunk!) and I think I will forgo the Christmas hat, but may make his top hat festively red!

I want to bring elements of the background out a bit more, such as the stockings.

When Geoffrey's a little more fully coloured, I will need to start blending him into the background a little more.

That's been enough for today though. My housemate is back and has wine!

-Curt-

Part 3 is here!

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Sainsbury's Christmas ad just seems crass!

Or click here to view it on YouTube for a higher quality version.

Hi! We're Sainsburys. War can be horrible and scary and brutal as human lives are manipulated and torn apart by the political powers-that-be in the name of justice and liberty. People die violently and families and communities are devastated. But sometimes, people can retain their humanity in the midst of all this and show kindness and compassion beyond the horror they're experiencing. That's the power of the human spirit, no matter the country we're from or the language we speak. It's what makes us human. And it's beautiful.

Now, buy a turkey. Just £9.99 in aisle 5 with double Nectar points available until December 15th. Packs of mince pies - buy one get one free! Sherry - 30% off! Free footballing trench soldier plushie for every spend over £50!
Live Well for Less.

Don't get me wrong - I think this advert is beautiful. It's made beautifully and evokes real emotion. The production values are good for a movie and staggering for a commercial!

It is scarily though-provoking and more effective than more than one war film I've seen with larger budgets and hours of screen time to utilise.

I've read letters from the trenches before now that detail this event. It really happened that the British and German soldiers met between the trenches on The Western Front, exchanged gifts, and had a kickabout at Christmastime. (Not in all areas, mind. It wasn't universal. It just happened in some instances but has been inflated in the retelling to a magical outpouring of ubiquitous human solidarity.)
That this happened at all is both beautiful and devastating. That realisation that a few hours ago, they were trying to take each others' lives, that the person you're playing a game with now is potentially the very same person that put a bullet through your best mate's skull a few hours ago; That in a few more hours, you will be back to horrifically maiming each other and taking each others lives again despite having nothing against each other apart from the fact that a different political power put a gun in your hand, pointed you in opposite directions and said march that way or die must be crushing and so so confusing. It's powerful to see that realisation re-enacted on film, but to have lived it - I can't imagine how much that would mess with your mind.

I'll think about the advert. Maybe I'll come to think that actually this is appropriate, especially given the partnership with The Royal British Legion. Maybe I'll see it less as an advert, and more Sainsbury's simply pinning their colours to the wall. Maybe I'll come to realise that all ads are used to generate an emotional response in the viewer to prime them to spend and that if we draw the line with this ad, we'll have to start declaring other emotive experience No-Man's-Land for marketers.

This may be a knee-jerk initial reaction, but right now it just feels a bit grubby that Sainsbury's are using it, highlighting the gifting element of it, and using the memory of the millions of fallen soldiers to sell more Brussels sprouts and 6 packs of Carling, shore up their bottom line, and widen their profit margins.

At the end of this advert, Jim is back in the trench overwhelmed with the experience that just happened, knowing that tomorrow there's an extremely high chance that both he and Otto and all the men around them will be slaughtered. They won't be sitting round the telly tipsily watching the new Dr. Who in the new "Tu Clothing Collection - only at Sainsbury's" Christmas jumper their nan gave them for Christmas, with all the presents opened from underneath their Sainsbury's bought Christmas tree.

The short film Sainsbury's have made is beautiful. It makes it dangerously easy to forget that war itself isn't at all.

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A Coggington Christmas Card: Work in Progress - Part 1.

Written on 14/9/14 but not posted until after I announced my Christmas card for sale.

I have started my Steampunk Coggingtons Christmas card tonight. I won't post this blog post until after I have published the card. (Edit: The finished card is now available here)
I don't know if anyone's interested to know how or why I made the decisions I did about this card, but here comes the reasoning.
Concentrate.

I've had a few ideas about the basic idea. On the one hand, I would like to show Geoffrey Coggington as a Santa-type figure. I have ideas about epic steam powered sleighs and I've got a couple of photos of outdoors in Brum from Christmas from years back to use as backdrops for this.
But also, I want to show Geoffrey as a dad figure with his family. But I have yet to cement the idea of who his family is in my own head, let alone anyone else's. I also have some photos of my own living room from last Christmas that I would quite like to get in there with that concept.

I've decided to kind of combine the Geoffrey as Santa idea with the home idea. I hope to produce different Christmas cards that explore all of these ideas at some point - maybe for this Chritsmas, maybe next.

Here's the design as it stands:

It's my living room in the background with the tones tweaked in it to make it warmer than the photo suggested. There's also a separate picture of the Christmas tree which shows it a little better and I have brought that out of the background and enlarged it to the foreground. It's still got a fair bit of its own background surrounding it.
Obviously, I drew Geoffrey in there.
I didn't know what sort of coat I wanted for him. A traditional done up Santa coat like so was my first thought:

This , though,covers up so much of his chest that only his head really shows, and I don't want him to just look like a Santa with an orange head. For the same reason, I don't want him to wear trousers. I need enough of him showing that people unfamiliar with previous Coggington cards understand what he is. However, with a short coat and no trousers and with his waist/hip area exposed, he could just look indecent. (That said, it worked for Donald Duck. I still don't get why he covers his nether regions whenever he loses his top, though. They're ALWAYS exposed!).

So then I thought about a coat more like this one: 

The problem here though, was that with the pose I'd given him, an open long coat like this just draped awkwardly and looked little like a Santa coat.

Having caught a bit of Star Trek: Generations on telly when I'd gotten in earlier today, this popped into my head as I pondered this problem:

After a bit of Googling for historical military jackets, which fitted in with my idea of G. Coggington as the captain and pilot of his sleigh, I found this which justified that style of jacket with my idea in my eyes:

After toying with the idea of him in a top hat, versus him in a Santa hat, versus him in a top hat with a Santa hat on top, I've decided, for now, to forgo the Santa hat and hope the whole scenario conveys his Santa-ness.

That decided, I've laid down the flat colours on Geoff. 

That's enough for tonight.

Bed beckons and work is peering at me from under the cover of tomorrow morning.

Part 2 is here!

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Me and Music.

One of the many jobs I've had, and one of the ones I'm still actively doing is DJing.

I've been doing it a fair while now. Somewhere in the region of 7 or 8 years.
I started at Birmingham's Subculture and Subside when Subside opened and my school friend Rob, who'd DJed at Subculture for a while, asked if I'd be interested.

Since then I've DJed at Subculture in all its incarnations: Dale End Academy, O2 Academy, Vudu, The Ballroom (so... Dale End Academy again) and The Rooftop. I've DJed Scruffy Murphys, HMV Institute, Barracuda Club, Velvet Lounge, The Marrs Barr, The Doghouse tent at Download, and a fair few weddings and other private functions.

I enjoy it! I was a late started when it comes to listening to music. I didn't listen to music until I was 14. I remember my dad randomly giving me tapes he'd got off people at work because he wanted me to listen to something! I remember TFI Friday being one of the first influences on my current tastes. I distinctly remember Aerosmith being on the show and playing "Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" and I loved it. The next schoolday I was in Goodfellas record shop in Kings Heath, buying the CD single I ever bought. I'm still chuffed that my first single purchase was by Aerosmith! I did, then, go through a brief period of listening to some abysmal stuff: The Honeyz, Spice Girls, and The Tamperer amongst others.

Yeah... I own this.

But I also own this!

And this, actually, for the different B-Side

For a while, TFI Friday fed a lot of my music taste, and Goodfellas supplied a lot of my music collection. I remember Stereophonics being on the show and playing "The Bartender and the Thief" and I loved that too. The next schoolday I was in Goodfellas, this time half-humming half-singing the song at them because I couldn't remember the name of it or most of the words. I ended up getting a reputation with the staff. I was "that humming kid". Remember, this was in the days before I had a mobile phone or even an internet connection at home. Shazam didn't exist, and Google was just around the corner.

I can't remember half the stuff that came out of this relationship between me, TFI Friday, and Goodfellas but I know Manic Street Preachers were involved at some point. And The Beautiful South.

The first album I bought was from my schoolmate Jamie, who I used to walk most of the way home with from school. I remember one time, he was catching a bus somewhere and had no bus fare. He pulled the Green Day album "Dookie" out of his bag and said, "I'm bored of this and I need bus fare. You can have it for a couple of quid." I'd heard of Green Day but never heard them and the album had cartoons on the cover so the deal was made. And I loved them. I'm still chuffed that my first album purchase was by Green Day!

Shortly after, I remember being in a rehearsal for a play, and another schoolmate, Jon-Paul, was playing the Metallica album "Garage Inc." in the rehearsal space while we were waiting for something. Up until then, I'd always been a little afraid of metal. I'd always thought it would be screamy and weird, and dark, and demonic but the track "Mercyful Fate", the 11 minute long medley of Mercyful Fate songs blew me away! It would be sometime before I realised that this track was actually a cover, not Metallica's own material, and sometime more before I listened to the lyrics enough to realise that of all the Metallica songs to convince me metal was not all about demons and satan, this Mercyful Fate medley, covering "Evil", "Curse of the Pharaohs", "Satan's Fall", "A Corpse Without a Soul", and Into the Coven" was an ironic one.

Metallica in 1998: Not singing about Satan... unless they were.

Jon shortly after introduced me to this new band, Slipknot, and their debut album and I never really looked back from there.

I still found the whole image amusing back then...

From then, I enjoyed metal. For a while it was almost exclusively rock, punk and metal. It was a little later I started listening to other stuff, just as I was exposed to it and liked it really. But more of that another time...

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The Suicide of Aaron Swartz

I was reading emails from SumOfUs.org, a group set up in response to large corporations increasing power and often immoral decisions. One email was petitioning for Fox News to have an anchor fired after he called Robin Williams a coward for his suicide. Going after one man for an insensitive comment seemed a little out of place against their other campaigns until I saw the comment from the group’s founder, Taren Stinebrickner Kauffman, saying this one was personal because her partner, Aaron Swartz, had committed suicide 20 months to the day prior to Williams.

I’d not heard of him and I was intrigued about this so I searched for him online. This was the first article I read, and while it might paint a biased picture of the man and his idealism (or then again it might not; I never met him), this is terribly sad.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/02/aaron-swartz-hacker-genius-martyr-girlfriend-interview

To me, it feels sad any time I learn that someone felt that life was so unbearable that they had to stop but this has taken on a sort of symbolic poignancy for me. 

The article paints the man as ferociously intelligent, idealistic to a fault, and also determined to utilize both of these qualities in a realistic and meaningful way to make things better. When he fell foul of The System, which he was trying to make fairer for everyone, it stomped on him. Not long after he was dead.

This has just broken my heart a little.

As it's Halloween, I thought I'd post some things I'd learnt today that are tenuously relevant.


1.) The Vampire Squid exists!

Kinda beautiful-scary, no?

Its scientific name is Vampyroteuthis infernalis, which literally translated means "The Vampire Squid from Hell"!

No, really!

I should like to call it Trevor, instead. That's a much nicer name.


2.) Cotard's Syndrome is a condition whereby sufferers believe they are dead. They literally turn up to their GPs, complaining of having died.



3.) The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge may have passed, but is not forgotten.

4.) I want to try this beer!

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Happy Halloween!

It's almost that time of year where people dress up scarily/sluttily, and it's ok for children to threaten you in order to extort things from you.

I'm not actually working it for once! I usually am, either DJing or performing. I think I shall be having a chilled one with the girlfriend and her littl'un.

Have fun everyone!

-Curt-

Follow me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/curtisallenillustrator
And have a peek at my shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

Etsy

It's harder work than I realised running an Etsy shop, and I only have 6 items in mine at the moment: www.etsy.com/uk/shop/CapnDred .
At the moment, it's only Coggingtons stuff, but more is planned.

Things like SEO can be befuddling - knowing just how to write tags in a way to minimize redundancy but maximise exposure. Then the various ways of trying to get the shop noticed such as plugging it on Facebook (but without becoming an insufferable bore).
Then there's trying to figure out how Twitter works to plug it there, and the same with Instagram and Tumblr which I only really use because I wanted a good picture sharing social media site to plug my cards on.
Pinterest, which I had been using for myself now feels like there might be a way to use it creatively to sell some cards but I'm darned if I know what way that is!

There's Etsy's own forums, which can be fun and have a wealth of information on them. Simply being active there gets me some notice and is useful for getting views and some favourites, but doesn't seem to be translating into sales yet.

Then there's good old word of mouth, and now I'm selling at craft fairs too! So I need to get some more business cards printed up, that actually include my Etsy shop address.

Then I need to optimise my shop itself, making sure my banner and logos are good, making sure my prices are right, making sure my shop's policies are fair and legal, making sure my descriptions are accurate, yet enticing, and yet optimised for SEO, making sure my photos are attractive both as standalones, and displayed together on my page, or taken out of context and displayed in an Etsy treasury or frontpage.

This is not to mention the actual process of creating new items.

All of this is perpetual. It is never finished, because it is never right. Stats pages tell me what's being looked at and by how many people and how they found my shop or products and there is always something to tweak for my old products, and then more monitoring as I give figurative birth to a new product and try to mould it's development in the market. There is always something more that can be done and attending to it is addictive. I often find myself up late at night tweaking.

I've learnt masses about marketing and promotion for a small business and I find the actual learning and processes fun, but I need to make sure I don't disappear down the rabbit hole completely.

Harrassment

Yesterday, I saw this video through a link on Elite Daily.

It put me in mind of when I used to play the British-made Grand Theft Auto games where walking through the streets of its virtual, fictional American cities, as a male character you'd attract all sorts of comments, and overhear all sorts of other comments between the game's computer controlled characters.
I remember thinking the comments seemed over the top, and were probably a British developer's exaggeration of what American cities sounded like.

This video makes me think maybe I'm wrong.

It seems to me that this kind of cat-calling has little to do with trying to actually get a date or any kind of romance started. Realistically, how often would this approach have succeeded for these guys. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe if I actually did it, I would have a veritable harem going on right now.
However, I doubt it. I think this sort of calling is about establishing dominance. It's about establishing dominance over the woman in question, and about establishing alphaness in the presence of other males. It shows loudly that you are straight, that you are attracted to the socially acceptable "right" kind of woman, and that you have no fear about making this known. By shouting at this woman, they are staking a claim and reminding the woman, the generally physically weaker of the sexes, and the historically less-empowered of the sexes, that she is vulnerable and could be "had".
This sort of behaviour just never occurs to me. It's not like it's an impulse I fight down, or an urge I have but struggle with overcoming the nerves to do it. It just doesn't occur.

Yes - some of the guys are just asking, "how you doing?". You could argue they're just being friendly. They're just making conversation. You could. And I'm not going to say absolutely that those were their only motives. That would be unfair. But I think it would be naive to assume that they had nothing on their mind other than befriending another human being. I would suggest that remaining seated with your mates as a woman walks purposefully by and shouting "how you doing today?" at her doesn't suggest a genuine interest in either friendship or romance so much as a desire to look alpha in front of your mates.
Though it is silly and a running joke, there's a reason it's Joey's catcphrase on 'Friends'. It's a line.

As for the guys who walk alongside her, that's just creepy. The one guy seems to feel that it's his God-given right to be responded to by an absolute stranger who showed no interest in an interaction, and furthermore like it's his right to claim her telephone number.
The guy who just walks with her in silence for several minutes I have no idea about. It almost seems as if he wants to intimidate her into responding to him so that she made the first move. I wouldn't be surprised if after she told him to back off, he had a go at her involving the phrase, "it's a free country", thereby reaffirming a protective belief he holds that women approach him all the time but they all turn out to be crazy.

But I'm extrapolating, perhaps unfairly.

I can only imagine how horrible this feels. As a man, the nearest thing I've had happen is for a man to call out to me asking for a cigarette, or spare change or something, and then proceed to follow me and keep asking after I've said "no". I'll be honest, I've been nervous in these situations. I don't know when or if they'll leave me alone, and if they'll get nasty or violent if I continue declining. I spend my time then wondering if ignoring them, continuing declining politely, or getting angry back at them is the best way to end the situation.
That's over a cigarette I don't have to give or be taken.
This isn't over the prospect of a sexual experience I DO have to give or be taken.
And we all know how sexual thoughts can short circuit some men's thinking. It's certainly done some pretty stupid things to my own thinking before now and I've made some bad decisions in this state before.

Through this video, I've become aware of the Hollaback charity - http://www.ihollaback.org/, dedicated to ending street harassment. I don't yet know how they plan to do that, but I see they are raising money to make videos like this, organise for speakers to talk on this, and generally raise awareness. Maybe they're combating the argument that "I'm just being friendly," or "You look nice. Why shouldn't I tell you?" by pointing out that no - it's not friendly and it makes people uncomfortable when you do that so stop it.

Follow me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CurtisAllenIllustrator
Visit my shop: www.etsy.com/uk/shop/capndred

#ChocCoinGate

Search for ChocCoinGate. Go on. I'll wait.

Did you know Cadbury made chocolate coins? I work for Cadbury World and I didn't.
(Maybe I'm just a remiss employee, but I don't think so).

Search for #choccoingate on Twitter to gauge public response to the news that Cadbury isn't making chocolate coins anymore, or look at Birmingham Updates' Facebook post and check out the comments.

Am I alone in thinking this is ridiculous? If your Christmas is ruined so easily, you should probably take a good hard look at how you celebrate Christmas.
This has been picked up on by several local and national newspapers including broadsheets. Is this news? A confectioner is discontinuing one (and not one of the iconic ones) of of it's hundred of product lines. Why is this national news?

People are strange.


EDIT: Yahoo have it about right, here.


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And my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

Always learning!

I am currently designing a greetings card for someone. I can't put the design in progress up on here until after the card has been given to its recipient, obviously but I can chat a little about it here.

Last night, I sat up far too late. I wanted to get the card finished, or as near to finished as I could last night and mostly achieved that.

The image on the card is set in space and I had been putting off doing the background because I thought it would be massively time-consuming and hard going. So I cast about on the interwebs to see what I could see regarding spacey backgrounds that don't need a photo.

The result allowed me to do this, which I am very happy withs:

The gaps in the starfield are mostly covered by picture elements in the finished piece.

Now this is where I get twitchy about Photoshop. I always used to draw and paint the old-fashioned way where if there was a mark on the paper, it was because I'd physically put it there. With a drawing tablet and photoshop, when I'm using plain brushes, I feel that's ok. It's not "cheating". Using textures was something it took me a while to feel comfortable with using. The effects you can get off them are brilliant though so I have started using them. I try to use my own photos as a texture where possible, rather than download textures/photo references.

The starfield above was mostly done by applying a "noise" filter to a black background, then manipulating it in various ways. I didn't physically place any of those stars so is that ok?

I drew a circle for the planet, then used a bit of basic brush and erase, applied a texture and Photoshop's spherising effects, embossing, glow effects and various other things to create the planet. Is that ok?

I've not really experimented with different brushes and custom brushes much, but I know you can get great effects form them. Is that cheating?

What do you think?

Please do leave me a comment with your thoughts on whether this is cheating.

What is life?!

I have just spent the last couple of hours trying to sleep, all to no avail. Which is ironic because I spent the few hours immediately previous to that trying to stay awake. It's like my body knows which I want to be doing and decides to mess with me. My head was cloudy and fuzzy and I was blinking a lot and getting up and down a lot to stay awake for the last hour of work. Literally, at 17:06 (that is actually when I finish work) I felt grogginess and sleepiness lift almost in an instant.

I probably need to make some changes.

I have a 9-5 job (well, 8:42 - 17:06) and that is good. It's steady work. It pays regularly. There is no need for me to take it home. It does, however take up most of my day. From when I wake at about 7:30, until I get home about 17:35 is given over to work. Then I get in and have to do the essentials: y'know, eating, washing up, taking the rubbish out, ringing the insurance company, and so on.

Then, because in any given week I am usually DJing at least one night, there's that to think about. I normally decide the setlist on the fly but having a 9-5 with less time spent at home and less time on public transport, and less opportunity to sit up late listening to music makes it harder to keep up with new music so I have to make more of a concious effort to get new music and get it into sets. IT's getting harder. But I try when I can. And if I'm doing a special event with a genre or mood I'm not so familiar with, like a fetish night, or a speakeasy night, or a wedding with specific song requests that I may never have heard of, then I will plan out the setlist beforehand. That's time-consuming. I need to get hold of the music, listen to it, and figure out the best way to play it. Then there's the late nights DJing involves. I try, like tonight, to sleep beforehand but spending the only free bit of the day asleep feels like a waste. IF I can sleep. So tonight I will get to bed about 4am and be up again about 7:30am which will leave me painfully tired at work tomorrow. Then I'm Djing Subside from 8:30.

I also have my greetings cards business. I need to research and create new designs for that when I can. I also need to keep promoting my Etsy shop which currently, mostly sells steampunk and dieselpunk cards - https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/CapnDred. It's plugging it on social media - on my pages, finding groups and joining them and interacting and trying to get my name and products out there. It's drawing little things that are relevant to make sure I have content to post. It's repinning things that may encourage people to browse my Pinterest and find my cards. It's blogging like this. It's reblogging the tumblr posts of people who may be inclined to check out my stuff. It's commenting on Etsy's forum posts and getting involved in the community. I enjoy it and there's a lot to learn and I am enjoying learning. Then when sales come, I have to get them posted.

I find it hard to say no to new jobs. DJing new events that may be fun, or a new genre that I could have fun with. New drawing commissions that push me to improve or just feel nice to do.

I resent this sometimes and make myself put a film on to chill, but normally end up tweaking my Etsy shop listings while I do.

The thing with music and drawing and self-promotion is there's no end point. There is ALWAYS more that could be done. Which means whenever I get some free time, it is very easy to almost accidentally keep doing these things. Suddenly, it's 2:00am and I have work in the morning but a drawing that's nearly done, or a load of ideas for content to post, or just half an hour of a setlist to fill with a tricky transition from black metal to RnB. When I'm not doing anything actively, I feel like I'm wasting time. So I rarely chill. Jess has been great for me. We do things together often (we're doing a craft fair up in Bridgnorth on Saturday which I am really looking forward to but for which I will have had very little sleep on account of all of the above), but we also chill sometimes and I need that. She's let me rant at her about this and she's tolerant of how bad I am at making future plans. I worry about the fact I'm always tired and broke for her though. I don't like that.

All of this is compounded by the fact that no matter how long I work a regular job with regular daytime hours, my body clock still defaults to going to bed at 4am and waking around midday. It makes it hard and feel unnatural to go to bed at an appropriate time for work. 11pm would be a good time. 12 wouldn't be too bad. 2am is usual for me and it's just not enough! And 7:30 really doesn't feel like a time people should be up at all. My body clock wants me to get the recommended 8hrs sleep... it's just the wrong 8hrs for sensible civilised jobs.

And for all of it, I'm broke. I spent a lot of today at work researching the Aztecs and Maya for our presentations. I was using Google Earth to check out their historical sites - temples and the like and desperately, painfully wishing I could go there! But I consider a month where I finish the month without having gone over my overdraft limit a success and one where I finish with a few bob to spare makes me nervous that there is a bill around the corner I forgot about. Being able to drive down to Bournemouth and stop in a B&B for a friend's wedding was a decision I had to weigh carefully and figure out a contingency plan for how that would leave me short for the rest of the month.

I'm always working. I'm always broke. Because I'm always broke, I feel like I can't be turning down work when it comes so I'm always too tired and too busy to take stock of the situation and change it or at least organise it to be manageable.

Writing this has helped. Now, feeling like I could finally sleep again (like I could at work earlier) I have to get up and go to work.

Just posting for some analytics...

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

I don't know how this post will appear but I'm just posting this to let Bloglovin deliver me analytics.

Follow me there if you like.

Otherswise, carry on about your business.

Creating my Steampunk birthday card, with Geoffrey Coggington.

So, I decided to create a birthday card.

The decisions in this card were all very simple and, to be honest, it was quite a simple card to do.
I had couple of ideas about this. I knew I wanted to use the idea of a hot air balloon being a birthday balloon but didn't know whether I wanted to have a Coggington in the balloon, or interacting with it some way else.
When Izzy suggested having him holding onto the balloon, it sounded perfect and I liked the idea of it yanking him off his feet which went on to lend itself to the caption inside of "Don't Get Carried Away!"

I began with my now standard process of starting up a Pinterest board for the card and collected ideas and references and so on.
I took a few photos outside work of the sky, and downloaded a sheet of typewriter keys:

I'm a little disappointed I used a downloadable pack for the keys. I would rather have photographed them myself but I had a time restriction because I wanted one of these ready for someone's birthday, and I didn't have time to find and photograph a typewriter. Maybe one day...

I isolated the keys I wanted and digitally cut them out from their background and arranged them, set up  my drawing space with my regular Coggington grungey frame, then laid down my photograph of tea-stained paper with a blue colour layer over the top of it for a placeholder for the sky.

Then I pencilled in the design and lay down flat colours, just to see that it worked as a concept.

It seemed good, so I refiined the pencils to 'inks', digitally.

The photo I took of the sky was good, but a little too clearly defined so I blurred it up, then to give it some interest, I added some fake bokeh effect as described in this tutorial.
I considered cutting the trees out as they were a distraction, but decided against this as they give the pic a vague point of reference and suggest it isn't happening in a vacuum.

The original photo

With some blur added

With some bokeh

 "Bokeh" is the way a camera lens renders out of focus points of light and is often considered to be aesthetically pleasing so I wanted a little here in the trees.

Then I filled in the flat colours, and the shadows which was quite fiddly around the balloon's rigging, but nothing too complicated.

I had no idea how to create the flames and the glow of them in the balloon  so I had a close look at photo references to see how the flames appear in hot air balloons and then hand drew the flames and the glow effects.



Once I'd done that, it was mostly a case of adding textures to the drawing:
There is a crinkled paper texture (that I often use from a photograph I took after screwing up, then straightening out a sheet of new A4 paper) all over but carefully masked to reduce its intensity over the key areas of the drawing.
Likewise with a tea-stained paper texture I created and often use.
There's also a rusted metal to Geoffrey Coggington in separate sections such as torso, left leg, head, foot-bottom etc. I applied the texture and warped it to vaguely fit the contours of his body. For this purpose, I didn't need to map the texture to every contour of his body.
I also applied a flat rusty metal texture over all of Geoffrey, masked it to just the 'ink' outline, and brought up it's intensity while getting rid of the actual inks. This means his outline isn't entirely solid but made just of a rusty metal image.

I popped some shadows behind the typewriter keys and fiddled with their colour levels to make them fit in with the rest of the picture and added some lens flare across Geoffrey and this card was pretty much done!

The finished card! Click to buy!

I couldn't decide whether I liked it darker or lighter so I produced both and put it to a Facebook poll.
The darker one won by quite a large margin, but I have sold a few of the lighter ones too so it would seem there's a place for both!

The card is available now in my Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/capndred

-Curt-

Check out my Facebook page: www.facebook.com/curtisallenillustrator

I'm such a Photoshop n00b!

I still feel pretty new to Photoshop and Digital drawing and painting.

I have always drawn since I was old enough to hold a pencil. I had a fixation with drawing things "broke" when I was little. From "draw car broke" to the slightly more worrying "draw man broke", I always wanted things opened up. I think I just had the same curiosity I still do for the inner workings of things.
It progressed to copying pictures of Superman out of the comics my mum used to buy me, to developing my own stories for Superman to be involved with.
I did some oil paintings are a pre-teen and moved on to watercolours as a teenager.
I doodled through boring lessons at school and had exercise books and exams returned with scores of red pen telling me that these were not the appropriate places for my drawings.
At uni, I doodled some more, and did drawings for some of my friends as they asked for them.
When I left uni, and got a job in Theatre in Education, I produced more drawings for my friends while I was sat backstage waiting to go on.
While in Thailand in 2006, I picked up a copy of Photoshop CS3 because I thought it would be useful and it was cheaper over there. My laptop was in no way up to running it though so it lay dormant until 2008 when I coloured an old drawing I'd done about 4 years prior.

Click here to see it full-sized

At this point, I didn't have a drawing tablet so was colouring entirely using a mouse which wasn't ideal. Doing the hair in the above picture was a pain. A couple of colouring jobs done with a mouse led to me getting a Wacom drawing tablet and working with this since.
Since then, everything I've learnt to do has been self-taught. I've read bits of books on using Photoshop, and when I know there's something specific I want to do, I turn to the internet and helpful tutorials. I have a Pinterest board of tutorials that I want to started incorporating bits of into my future work.
I do, however, still work in quite a traditional way. I hand draw my drawings, either with pencils on paper and scanning them to Photoshop, or drawing them directly into Photoshop. Then I physically or digitally ink it as appropriate, apply colours, usually as flat washes then building up details to a finished piece.

I'm getting better at this and I've recently started using more and more photomanipulation to drop objects into pieces, and to create textures from photos. With the new steampunk Christmas card I've just completed, I decided to take the photo elements from being small items in the background or used as an ethereal overlay, to very much an essential part of the main picture.

Click here to see it full-sized

I still often struggle to get my pieces to look the way I want them to. I think I'm still a little locked into using traditional media and not thinking Photoshop enough. I also think I need to be more imaginative and more abstract with my concepts. I don't think I'm thinking of interesting enough concepts to need half the stuff Photoshop can do for me.

Firstly, I still haven't quite figured out Brushes. While I know the basics of how to create and use them, I haven't quite figured out the why. I tried using a brush I'd created from a photo of a fir branch little bit on the new Coggingtons card, to turn areas of black shadow on the Christmas tree into areas of textured green fir branches. You'll have to tell me how successful I was. Again though, this is very much using the brush as a peripheral feature whereas I know they can be used very much to create essential parts of a piece.

I keep seeing mention of using custom brushes, and I spoke briefly to my friend Adam Ford who extolled their virtues.

So, the next time I get time to do a bit of experimenting on a project, that's what I shall be doing.

-Curt-

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No sex please... we're Steampunks!

I got drawn into a discussion on Facebook the other day about the place of sex in steampunk.

As can be seen, it was a popular discussion that is currently discussing the merits of different types of cake!
Steampunks, it would seem, are nothing if not distractable. But for quite some time, the conversation stayed on topic, before wandering on and off it..

Sex pops up in all aspects of life - why not steampunk? Personally, I don't see that there's a problem. Steampunk is fun and so is sex. That, the way of the world, and Rule #34 say that sex is always going to pop up in steampunk, particularly where many gents are going for the dapper look (or even the rugged engineer look), and many women are donning corsets, specifically designed to emphasise traditionally sexy physical attributes.

I can understand wanting to go to an event or gathering where it wasn't overtly sexual and plenty of family-friendly, non-sexualised events and steampunk related things do occur.

But if people want to go more back-alley with their steampunk and explore the back-room bar, sky pirate, kinky victoriana and burlesque aspect of it, I don't see why not! As long as it's appropriately advertised and billed as such so that people don't end up somewhere, or taking their children to something they'd rather they didn't see. This can all be incorporated into the fun and eccentric world of steampunk. I'd hate to think that steampunk was such heavily regulated fun that there was no room for sex in it.

Sex is something I've yet to explore in any of my drawings or designs but I'd sure like to at some point in the future. 

(Check out www.facebook.com/CurtisAllenIllustrator to see what I do get up to...)

I like fancy dress. I don't think it has to be sexualised. It can be fun when it is. Kids can get involved in fancy dress, but I wouldn't take them to a 'whores and vicars' party.
Same goes here.

What are anyone else's thought on this?

-Curt-

Follow me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CurtisAllenIllustrator

Students who shine and students who blend

I read this article in Teach First magazine first, and found it online so I could share it here. It's from a teacher, writing about dealing with the students who stand out and the students who blend in.

I like Starkey's honesty.

Click here for the original blog post: http://stackofmarking.wordpress.com/2014/08/30/special/

What do you think?

-Curt-

Follow me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CurtisAllenIllustrator